Thread: Fighting for control

Yay! I think this is the right forum!

Alright so here is the issue I'm having. So far, I only experience lucid dreams via DILD. I used to keep a dream journal back when I was a teenager (though I've been meaning to start it up again, I just often forget to write the dream down when I wake up... to eager to jump into my day, I guess).

I'm decently good at recognising dream cues, I do recognise them more often than not. I'd have to say that out of 7 days a week, anywhere between 5-6 days have some form of lucid control happening.

It kind of depends on the dream, too. If my dream has a definitive plot, then I'm more likely to take some form of control over it. If all I'm getting is a light sleep and just random thoughts that I won't remember when I wake up... well there isn't much I can do about that (or is there?! ).

So, what's been happening lately is... here's an example. I'm an avid gamer of online role-playing games involving things like magic and what not. So this one occasion, I was dreaming that I had the ability to use the spells that my avatar uses. I was ready to just enjoy this dream as it was, but for some reason, this one spell wasn't working. In the game, it works regardless. So there was my dream cue, I remember thinking to myself, "Okay, seriously, this is lame, why is my brain not letting this spell work?" And I just decided that even though I couldn't visually see it working, I decided to let the dream continue on and let my actions continue on as if it were.

This happened again on another occasion very recently, but he's a more specific plot example. The particular ability I needed to happen was a thing called stealth in the gaming world. Essentially, you fade to transparent and you can walk past people undetected. I was on some kind of mission in my brain and I needed to stealth to complete what I needed to... but I wouldn't go transparent. Again, dream cue "woke" me up a little, and I was trying to force my brain to see myself go transparent, but it wasn't happening. So I decided, "Oh well, let's "stealth" then, without being transparent. Even though *I* can't see it, I know that's what I want, so let's walk past these people and see if my dream accepts that I'm stealthed." It did.

A more relatable fight for control is in the dream, I'll be flying. Always when I start to fly in dreams, it's my dream cue to "wake up." Only, as soon as I do, flying becomes more difficult, I can fly for a little bit, but I always land after a few seconds and I have to take off again.

So far, in my 13 years of lucid dreaming experience, this fight for control is very precedent. It's generally that I can't fully control the dream, I can only generally work with the current plot that my dream has given me, and even then, the only unquestionable control that I have are altering outcomes. If I don't like how a dream is going, I can change it to something more favourable. But when it comes to really taking control... giving myself abilities or even just detaching from the plot and exploring through flight or anything else, it's a BATTLE and I haven't been winning.

Now, that said, this new attitude I have taken with accepting the things I can't force my brain to see, but pretending it exists anyways... it's worked. But it feels like I'm not fullfilled because I can't see it. It's like flying without wings or casting a spell of a lightning bolt, but there's no lightning. Or being stealthed, but I appear fully visable.

These are super annoying! How can I push past this stage?